Part 1 in a Series of Book Marketing and Publicity Tips from Smith Publicity

While many books are launched in September or January, summer provides a great venue for authors to spread the word out about their books. Remember, newspapers, radio shows, magazines, etc. are still looking for entertaining, informative content!

New activities and hobbies. Both fiction and non-fiction books can be tapped for summer exploration of new interests. For example, if you have a non-fiction book about investing, a solid angle would be talking to your children about investing and projects parents and children can do together during summer for financial literacy. If your novel is about a musician, promote your book by offering tips on how summer is a great time for adults to take up an instrument.

Books in Print lists about 28 million ISBNs that are actively being bought and sold in the US, UK and Australia.

This, of course, does not include books with no ISBNs, and is not a global figure. But it's enough of a number to emphasize the point that there are an awful lot of books out there. And a self-published author, without the marketing and PR engine of a large publishing house behind her, or the funds to take out TV advertising time, desperately needs her readers to find her book amid these millions of others.

The ISBN was invented in the 1960s, when British bookseller W. H. Smith began computerizing its distribution system. It became an ISO standard in 1970, and now the ISBN forms the backbone of the book supply chain around the world. Certainly there are plenty of books published that do not have ISBNs. Proprietary publications that are not traded, for example, don’t require ISBNs. Books that are sold in “walled garden” environments don’t require ISBNs. So why use them?

There are loads of self-publishing services out there that promise a great deal of ease and speed in getting your book out there. And that’s fantastic, but many authors find that once they sign up, they’re on the hook for a lot more work than they had planned. This is because making a book is not an easy thing.

While mainstream publishing is disappointing authors in some ways, one way it’s succeeding is by printing the actual book. This is not simply as easy as sending an edited Word manuscript to a printer and magically getting a book back. There are lots of decisions and actual work that have to go into book production, and when an author is doing this herself…guess what? She’s the one who has to make these decisions and do this work.

So you release your book into the wide, wide world, and people read it. Then what?

There are going to be some things that you, as the author and as the publisher, cannot control. You can’t govern people’s responses to your book. You can’t fully control the information about your book that’s on store websites. You can’t totally control where the booksellers in a physical store place your book.

Marketing has changed a great deal since the days of Mad Men. Advertising agencies used to be able to essentially tell consumers what they should buy – broadcasting the message over mass media (television, which used to be 3 or 4 channels, and radio, in newspapers and magazines).

But media itself has changed radically in the last 15 years. The World Wide Web, cable television, satellite radio have all contributed to a fracturing of the “mass” audience. Messages now have to be tailored to these fragments, rather than broadcasted to the whole. And – particularly on the Web – these fragments tend to talk back.

As the Dowager Countess says in Downton Abbey about the telephone, “Is this an instrument of communication or torture?” Social media can certainly be both. Let’s break down the different tools in the social media toolbox, and then talk about ways they can be used, and ways they can be (however inadvertently) abused.